"Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards."

How is FFOS different from ChromeOS? Don't they cater to the same developers? Shouldn't the bulk of the code written for one of these systems work on the other (after all they're "just" HTML5)? If there's any hope for these, then there would be a convergence of the System level APIs so that the apps could be more portable across them, and then in to the browsers.

I don't know why FFOS would have any less of a chance than ChromeOS, save for being a bit later to the game.